After all these years, with newgem, mr.bones, bundler… I still use
Hoe. Emphatically. Why?

Because it saves me time. Lots of it.

Because it saves me from pain. Lots of it.

Because it saves me from my own stupidity. (Lots of it)

Once you have 2+ gems, there are so many reasons to use Hoe and so few
legitimate (to me) ones not to.

I’m at about ~600 releases across ~90 projects using Hoe. In that
time, Hoe has unified all the project’s common meta-everything. It’s
cleaned up the Rakefiles and yet provided me with much more
functionality than almost every other gem-whatsit out there. I can
test, package, publish, document, announce… all with rake.
Everything is verified to be correct from the tests to the gem
contents.

If I need special functionality for a single project, I don’t just
lump than in with Hoe. I use Hoe’s powerful plugin system. First, I
look to see if someone else has already added this functionality via
their own gem. There are many:

hoe-bundler - Generates a Gemfile based on a Hoe’s declared dependencies.

If one doesn’t already exist, then I create my own gem (eg
gem-seattlerb) and add it there. Then I can extend that one project.
It is as customizable as you want it to be. (See JB’s project
hoe-plugin-examples for more plugin examples)

In short, if you’ve got more than one gem, you need to be using
something like Hoe. Period. Life is short, time is valuable, and
you’ll fuck something up otherwise.